Chelsea's XI isn't much better than Man Utd's or Liverpool 3885

Simon

Different? How so? Rooney, Smith, Miller, Heinze, Saha, PiquŽ, Rossi all arrived in 2004 same as Mourinho and his men.

I'm not an accountant so forgive me if my numbers are a bit off but Lazio did some big spending when SGE was at the helm if you recall that they had Juan Sebastian Veron, Marcelo Salas, Alessandro Nesta, Fernando Couto, Angelo Peruzzi, Giuseppe Pancaro, Pavel Nedved, Diego Pablo Simeone, Fabrizio Ravanelli, Luca Marchegiani, Sinisa Mihajlovic. All in all a very expensive squad.

And in 2000 Real Madrid bought Figo, Solari, Cesar, Pedro Munitis, Fl‡vio Concei�‹o and Makelele and add in the inflation over the past 5 years and it was a very expensive budget for that season for Real Madrid.

I believe Chelsea spent 107 million pounds in the Summer of 2003 and didn't win anything.

When Mourinho arrived he got rid of several of those players included in those 107 million pounds namely Mutu, Smertin, Neil Sullivan, Veron, all hired by Rainieri all let go by Mourinho so it's not like Chelsea buys and buys without releasing players and recouping some money with it.

If SAF had the guts to sell OGS, O'Shea, Bellion, Fortune, Kenny Cooper, Fletcher, Wes Brown, Silvestre and Tim Howard during the Summer he could have gone about the job of rebuilding the squad with a major overhaul bringing in a world clbutt zonal marking CB to pair with Ferdinand and a world clbutt DM to replace Keane and a world clbutt winger that could play on either flank.

Man Utd has an aging core of key players and bringing in 1 young player a season will not help recycle an unbalanced squad where key players are either too young or too old.

As for Queiroz, any man that can keep Man Utd suffering as few goals while having Mikael Silvestre in the starting XI deserves a medal.

AndrŽ